Ireland

The challenge that the Irish economy faces can best be described in the context of flows and stocks of assets and liabilities. Under the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the IMF/EU/ECB Troika, Ireland must implement a severe fiscal…

Here's Roger Bootle talking to Bloomberg's Maryam Nemazee about the deal hammered out yesterday to 'save Greece.' He is quite sceptical. First, the 120% debt to GDP figure that the deal is predicated on reaching is still high and assumes a…

Markets’ initial reaction to the latest EU emergency summit has been positive. Risk assets are trading up, risk-sensitive currencies are up, European bank stocks are up, and the broader stock market is as well. This relief rally is…

Here are a few charts from the credit default swaps market based on 5-year CDS. Here’s what I see.

Here’s a great chart just released by the International Monetary Fund for Greece, Portugal, and Ireland as well as Japan, the US and the UK. Note that almost half of the US federal government debt is held by the Federal Reserve and the…

At the beginning of the year, the 60-day correlation between Irish and Greek 10-year yields was above 0.90. Today, the correlation stands at -0.42. At the same time, Irish 10-year bonds yields have become significantly more correlated with…

10% ‘internal devaluation’ in Germany took eight years. We are talking now about 20-30% wage and price cuts in Greece and Ireland. How realistic is that?

It is high time politicians in Berlin to started to recognise that fiscal austerity is not the be all and end all of the policy issues they now face. Ireland is applying fiscal austerity, but this alone may well not be enough. A better…

It would easy to say something like, “The euro is an abomination and the peripherals should simply leave or be tossed out of the euro zone.” But, we are here now. The political imperatives for closer European ties that created the single…

Euroland is coming apart at the seams. Belgian/Bund spreads are now also over 200bps along with Italy and Spain. Belgium has just entered the periphery and France is not far behind.